Identity--A Tale in Several Episodes-Episode One

I was born in Amirieh neighborhood of Tehran. Before my first birthday, my parents moved us into a huge villa style house in suburban Tehran. I grew up in that suburb of Tehran, attended schools nearby and eventually went to Kharazmi High School from which I graduated.

I was a typical Tehrani girl who knew the city like the back of her hand, and was nimble in moving from one point to another, claiming the big, beautiful, ugly Tehran as her hometown. My parents had come to Tehran from Hamadan in the 1940’s when they had been very young, and had later married and given birth to all my brothers and sisters in Tehran.

Our contact with Hamadan had been very limited and infrequent, limited for the most part to some relatives of my father’s visits to Tehran. I have vague recollections of trips to Hamadan when I was very young, and I didn’t really see Hamadan again until I was 16, when my parents took me and my sisters to stay at Bou Ali Hotel, very much like tourists. Though it was a memorable trip, I was not impressed by Hamadan. Feeling completely unattached to anywhere other than Tehran, if anybody ever asked me where I was from, I would say I was from Tehran, and refused to acknowledge any ties with Hamadan. Later, when I came to US to study, for more than a decade I intermittently and interchangeably forgot about my neighborhood, Tehran, Hamadan, and Iran. I will explain in the next installments how and when I remembered them again.

(To be continued...)